Not the Retiring Kind

Nobody responded. "Well, I guess you're going to have to move there," Sheehan proposed.

Her fellow marchers were equally fratricidal as they chanted slogans against Pelosi ("You can't run, you can't hide! Cindy Sheehan's right behind!) and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.): "Conyers, Conyers, you are able! Put impeachment on the table!"

One of the activists, David Swanson, wore fake blood on his hands and explained the march to the ultraliberal Conyers's office: "We are going to be there to demand impeachment, and if we do not get it, we are not going to leave."

A man wearing a Bush mask and red tights and carrying a devil's pitchfork delivered a harsh judgment on his fellow marchers. "They're not going to get anywhere," he said.

He was right: Congressional leaders have ruled out impeachment as a waste of time that -- even if it were somehow successful -- would serve only to elevate Vice President Cheney. But the bleak prospects did not seem to dim Sheehan's joy as she returned to active duty. She received hugs, handshakes and even jewelry from fellow activists. She wore short pants that showed the ankle tattoos of her son's name and the Chinese symbol for heaven.

"So, um, I was retired," she told the crowd, to scattered laughter, "and I retired because I believed that myself and my group had gone as far as we could."

But Libby changed all that, and by yesterday Sheehan even thought the planes departing from National Airport were conspiring against her. "They stepped up the air traffic," she complained as a jet interrupted her speech.

The paranoid also may have been suspicious about the low-flying military helicopter as the marchers crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge, or the man in the car with U.S. government plates who took pictures of the demonstrators as they reached the Tidal Basin -- "for personal use," he claimed.

And marchers certainly had reason to beware of the conservatives from Free Republic who held a poster of Osama bin Laden claiming Sheehan as his "best friend," and the war widows who ambushed Sheehan in the Rayburn House Office Building.

But Sheehan could not afford to dwell on her enemies; she was busy antagonizing her erstwhile friend, the antiwar Conyers. As police kept order among her fellow activists in the hallway, she waited in the congressman's office for more than an hour before he met with her. When, as expected, Conyers refused to budge, Sheehan planted herself until police led her off in plastic handcuffs.

Counting on her fingers, Sheehan said it was the eighth time she'd been arrested -- but her first since retirement.

Check out the multimedia version of this Washington Sketch athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/sketch.